


From Darkness

by goldfinch



Category: The Borgias
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Depression, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 16:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1948656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After months spent in the Castel Sant'Angelo, beneath the whip and rack of Pope Julius II, Micheletto returns to Forlì.</p><p> Из тьмы <a href="https://ficbook.net/readfic/5373638">Перевод на русский.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	From Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> After Julius II came to power, Micheletto was captured and tortured in the Castel Sant'Angelo for information about the Borgias. He revealed nothing. Cesare was captured and held in Spain for a time, but eventually escaped—by rappelling down from his window—and travelled to Navarre to fight in his brother-in-law the king's army. Everything else is fiction.
> 
> Also, it should be mentioned that since characterizations are pulled from Showtime's series, in this story Micheletto can read and write. Because, let's be real, that shit was super dumb.
> 
> Also also! The wonderful [Catwolf](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Catwolf/pseuds/Catwolf) has translated this fic into Russian! Link here: [Из тьмы](https://ficbook.net/readfic/5373638).

Pope Julius II, once called Giuliano Della Rovere, has a fondness for the whip.

"So that you may suffer as our Savior suffered," he tells Micheletto, scalp shining in the torchlight beneath Castel Sant'Angelo. His hair is sparse and white, and he is thinner than a man has any right to be—but that will change, now that he is Pope. His wrath will not leave him so easily. He has suffered much at Cesare's hands, and more at Rodrigo Borgia's, and though one is imprisoned and the other dead, and both beyond his reach, Micheletto is under his power, and will suffer for each of them in turn.

The whip has always been the easiest. The other instruments are not so easily endured, but Micheletto has spent years and years inflicting pain, and that has taught him the best ways of keeping silent. The scars Cesare gave him at the beginning of his service are lost beneath new wounds. They become scars, and then wounds again.

Before Della Rovere’s long hand closed its fist around him in a tavern just south of Milan, Micheletto heard stories. Of the new Pope’s ruthlessness and rage, his implacable hatred of Cesare Borgia. Nothing Micheletto had not known already. But it is one thing to know a man, and another to hear people’s stories about him. They call Della Rovere the Warrior Pope. They call him fearsome. He will strike the Borgia name from the Papacy, from the Romagna, from the cannon forged with Cesare’s arms. He will cover their pictures, and their apartments will be sealed; he will cross out their name from every document. Della Rovere is the lash of the whip, the creak of Micheletto’s joints, the ghost of pain that has gone from him and hovers over him in the darkness of his cell.

Weeks pass. Months. He remembers the way Cesare looked at him the first time they met, as though he’d stumbled upon a treasure.

 

 

 

 

He hears the gate open first, a keening screech of metal on metal at the end of the hall. The approaching flame casts uncertain shadows across the floor, and Micheletto imagines he can see faces in the darkness, bright-eyed, dark-haired. All the men he has loved resemble one another, but only one has eyes that burn like that. “You,” his gaoler says. “Get up.”

The gaoler opens the door, beckons. It is a trick, of course. He has played such games himself, to break a man's spirit, has taken the long walk to the front gate only to turn back to the cells. But he must walk, and so he walks.

Long, damp halls, crypt-cold and filthy. The heat of Rome in summer is like being thrust into a fire. And because it will be something to hold onto later, Micheletto raises his eyes, and stares for a long moment at the city he once walked freely in the service of his lord. It is a different place now, and not one that he likes. He can smell it from here. The reek of human habitation, sweat and dirty water and disease. Across the low-running river, the skeleton of a dome rises from inside the Vatican walls, and to the left an old, sway-backed mare is making its way across the river. He thinks of all the corpses he has dumped into the Tiber, their bones picked clean by fish and piled up in eddies.

At the end of the bridge, the horse leans toward them. The man leading it hands the reins to Micheletto's gaoler, and then pauses.

"It's a bad idea, if you ask me," he says.

The gaoler grunts. "No one did. Get." He tosses the reins to Micheletto. "You too.”

Micheletto stares at him. The reins are old and worn in his hands, but clean where he drags the edge of his thumbnail against the leather. They feel strong enough. He could lurch forward, knock the man to the ground, and have the reins around his throat in a matter of seconds.

"Go on," the gaoler says. And then, because Micheletto remains silent, "The Pope's ordered you freed."

 

 

 

 

He goes home. It takes him two weeks to get to Forlì—longer than it should, but his body aches and he cannot sit a horse for long. He steals money to pay for rooms by easing drunk men into the shadows, then relieving them of their purses. He does not kill them. There is no profit in it, and he does not want to dispose of bodies, not here in towns he does not know, when all his joints ache and his back is a bloody mess from the whip. He binds his own wounds and makes his own poultices, and sleeps uneasily in beds much softer than he is used to. He avoids taverns. He avoids crowds. He avoids cities where he might be recognized.

Outside Rimini he sees a pack of dogs running through the hills, cut free of the city in search of still wilder game. They keep their distance, but he sees their eyes sometimes, shining green beyond the circle of his fire. When he has leftover meat, he tosses it to them. They seem grateful. 

But dogs are poor company, and he is glad when at last he sees the Rocca di Ravaldino in the distance. The damage from the siege has been repaired, its battlements rising smooth and strong over the scattered, uneven sprawl of Forlì. There are cannon mounted behind the walls, he knows, though he cannot see them. Cesare put them there. But like so much else, now they too belong to Pope Julius. The city walls belong to him, and the people inside, insofar as they owe him tithes, the river and a portion of the harvest and the lives of the soldiers belong to him. 

But Micheletto knows this forest, these certain trees. And he knows Forlì’s winding, uneven roads. He walks past the bakery, and the cobbler’s, past the smithy, where he often bought tools as a boy. The doors of his mother’s house creak a little on their hinges, but a fire burns in the hearth, and the small room is warm. There’s a pot on the fire, and a girl standing watch that he doesn’t recognize. She’s a small girl, mousy and preoccupied, one thumbnail hooked between her teeth. She’s thinner even than Cesare, the day Micheletto carried him to the litter that would bear him out of Rome, when things first began to fall apart around them. 

The girl jumps when she finally sees him. Over the fire, the pot sloshes dangerously. Beef stew. He can smell it.

“My mother,” he says.

“Your—”

“Isabella Corella.”

She lifts one trembling finger toward the door, toward the fields beyond them. Her fear is not her fault. He has cut his beard, and trimmed his hair with a stolen knife the day after he escaped, but captivity has stripped the flesh from his bones and left him weak. He can pretend at strength, but strength does not make him look more approachable—he has never had that quality. He has never needed it.

At the end of the road, where the town gives way to farmland, he finds his mother tending a garden. She is wearing a dress he does not recognize, and a bodice that he does. Her shoes are old. For a moment he stands there at the edge of the tomatoes, watching her. It’s been nearly four years since he and Cesare last came to Forlì. There is more grey in her hair and she weighs a little less; she probably has more wrinkles. He can catalogue every line and curve of Cesare’s face, every flash of his eyes and curve of his mouth, but he looks at his mother and she looks more or less the same.

“Mama.”

The basket slips from her hands, onions spilling out into the dirt, and then she’s hugging him, saying, “My boy, my boy,” over and over. “Not even a letter for four years. I thought you were dead.”

He helps her pick up the onions, and then they turn back toward Forli, down the crooked streets toward the house. She remarks on his weight, on his uneven hair, his unkempt beard, his general run-down air. He doesn’t say much. Everything she says is true, and he has little news to share with her anyway. The lives of the rats beneath the Castel Sant’Angelo are of no interest to anyone and he does not wish her to see his scars, not before he thinks of a lie to tell her.

He glances down to both ends of the road as they approach it, and it is half his life’s work, half his months spent in the Castel Sant’Angelo, killing rats and opening his mouth to swallow pain. He reaches a hand out toward his mother’s back, but does not touch her. “Is there supper?”

“Beef stew,” his mother says. “Gianetta is cooking.”

“Gianetta?”

His mother flaps a hand in the air. “A neighbor’s girl. Her parents died a few years ago, so I took her in. Taught her how to cook, how to sew.”

“You always wanted a girl.”

“No.” She smiles. “No. I had my Micheletto. But you come to visit so rarely, and it’s nice to have someone to cook sometimes and keep the house. She is a good girl—though too young for you, I think.” He doesn’t know if she’s serious or joking; her face is half turned away and her voice gives nothing away. But when she glances up at him, her lips turn up in a smile.

“Mama.”

“You should have married years ago! And you’re a doctore, now. Any girl would be lucky.” She takes his hand, tucks it into her elbow. “Think about it, at least. For me.”

He closes his eyes and breathes in, once. The air smells like fertilizer, like cattle and dust on the summer road. Nothing like Rome, or even Cesena, where Cesare laid out for him the scope of his ambitions. “I will.”

He eats, and his mother chops onions at the end of the table and she talks. She tells him about the village, about the crops, about the various loves and grudges that have sprung up in his absence. The family two doors down have had a daughter, and then a son. Eight people he knows have been married, and two have died. There was that drought last year she was afraid would ruin them, but God sent rain in time, and come autumn the harvest was as bountiful as you pleased. 

When she pauses he asks, carefully, “Have you heard news of the Duke Valentino?"

The knife flashes in his mother’s hands; she tilts it to wipe the onions from the blade, and then the water from her eyes. “Oh, all Italy has heard that news. He escaped over a month ago now. They say he scaled the tower with his bare hands, which must be a lie—but there is more important news. Even where you were, you must have heard we have a new Pope?"

Micheletto swallows, dips his spoon into his bowl again. “I have heard that news, yes."

"Julius II, he's called. Like Caesar!” Her face is bright, the bridge of her nose pink with sunburn. “They say he means to reclaim the Papal states all the way north to Perugia. He’s better than the last Pope already.”

"Considering that the last Pope was Pope for less than month, yes.”

“No, no, the other one. That Borgia."

Italy might have had another Borgia for Pope, in name if nothing else. Cesare never said as much, but Micheletto was no stranger to the way his lord’s mind worked. The Romagna, the Marches—that was only the beginning. Alexander would have pushed it through somehow. And if not Pope, then King. 

Your Grace. He turns the title over in his mouth. Your Majesty. Something roars up in his chest and it feels like heartache.

When he looks up, the girl is offering him a knife from across the table. It’s a good, long knife, serrated, which makes it a bad choice for killing but not for certain kinds of torture. 

“Would you like some bread?” she asks.

 

 

 

 

He sends letters to people he knows in Rome. To Niccolò Machiavelli, in Florence, and to Lucrezia in Ferrara. What news? he asks. What have you heard? Lucrezia writes back first, in her own hand, but she has nothing for him. Cesare was imprisoned in Naples and then in Rome and then he was taken to Spain, and Lucrezia petitioned everyone she knew for his release. She has not heard from him since his escape. And his contacts in Rome know even less than that. They tell him Cesare walked out the window of his prison, then strode away into the sky. They tell him Cesare won his freedom in a game of cards. They say he is in France with his wife, that he is in Rome, working for Pope Julius, that he has taken up arms with Florence as a condottiero, and every word of it is either rumors or lies. Niccolò tells him that the political situation in Florence is unstable, and that he has been in Rome for the past three months, hearing nothing but the black rages of His Holiness Pope Julius II, who is careful what he says in front of diplomats. But he was thankful to hear of Micheletto’s release, he writes. If there is anything he can do.

So Cesare escaped, but who is to know what has happened to him since? He would have been traveling swiftly, with few companions. The roads can be dangerous. And with no word one way or the other, what can Micheletto do? He helps his mother in the fields, and with errands. My son is home, she says. She tells the neighbors, and her friends, and the shopkeepers she visits for meat and bread and a new pair of boots for Micheletto, who has only the soft shoes he stole from a drunk in Urbino. While he’s fitting them, the cobbler tells him the last doctore to come through set a broken bone so that the girl will limp for the rest of her life, and that he hopes Micheletto is better. Micheletto doesn’t know if it’s a wish or a threat; he’s silent either way.

His mother sees his scars a week after he arrives, surprising him in the kitchen as he changes. He shrugs at her tears, finishes pulling his shirt on over his head. “I was caught stealing,” he tells her. “There was no money, and I was hungry, and I am lucky they did not take a hand.”

There are tears in her eyes when she hugs him, but it is Gianetta he catches watching him from the corners of her eyes, when she thinks he cannot see her. Sometimes he can’t; sometimes it’s just a prickle of awareness at the back of his neck, but he knows. Half of being an assassin is being invisible. The other half is knowing when you’ve been seen. When he catches her at it, she smiles. 

If he was still in Rome her feelings would be a good thing, would be something he could use, for information or services, but in Forlì there is no advantage to be had. There is nothing he can do with her lingering glances, her girlish crush. The men I have loved are dead, he thinks at her. There is nothing for you here.

 

 

 

 

June ends in heat and green, aqueous light. There’s a storm coming up over the mountains, grey clouds dark as the word of God in Cesare’s mouth, and Micheletto stands in the doorway to listen to the thunder and watch lightning splinter over the Rocca. There hadn’t been windows in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Not where he was. Where Caterina Sforza stayed, above ground level, there were windows and clean floors, cards, books if she’d wanted them, but Micheletto was given no such luxuries. This is the first storm he’s seen in over a year. The thunder makes his skin itch.

Even then the inside of the house is as dark as the cells beneath Castel Sant’Angelo. He doesn’t like to stay indoors, but he doesn’t like to go out either; he is twitchy, too quick to react to a whisper of fabric, to noises in the dark. He has not slept well since the Castel Sant’Angelo. On the road that had been easy enough to explain, but the nights here are quiet, and the bed is soft, and he is safer here than he has been in months. But his dreams are black, uneasy things, like wallowing in tar. At night he lies stretched beside the low heat of the fireplace, and when morning comes, Gianetta lays a hand on his shoulder. He closes his eyes when she enters the room, and opens them when she touches him.

On particularly bad nights, when he wakes with his breath strangled in his throat, he rises and goes with his stolen sword and his mother’s cheese cutter into the field. The sword is not of the best quality, but he has sharpened it to a wicked silver edge, and the cheese-cutter works as well as it ever has. It feels good. He stands in the middle of the field, breathes, moves. In the last few years of the campaign he and Cesare often sparred together, and he is used to the flow of the movement of their bodies, swords adder-quick between them. Now he moves against air in a stiff, invisible dance, one, two, three; he bends low and severs a wildflower’s head from its stem, just to feel the resistance.

Four years ago, Cesare had a sword made for him in Rome. Plain, the way he’d requested, but perfectly balanced. A work of art. It must be in the Vatican armory by now, or perhaps Della Rovere kept it as a trophy, for his personal use on these warpaths he’s laid up north all the way to Perugia. Della Rovere once raved against the corruption of Rodrigo Borgia, but he is even more a warmonger, furious at and paranoid of the man he betrayed to hold the Papacy. Sometimes Machiavelli sends letters, the wax unmarked, the paper cheap, sent the slow way from Rome or Florence or wherever he is posted, he never says. He does not sign his name. He writes, His Holiness fears for his life. He is convinced Cesare Borgia will come into his chambers and slit his throat as he sleeps. He is afraid of being poisoned. He is afraid of being strangled. Florence has need of a _borgello_ , should you find yourself in need of employment. The money is good.

The sword cuts a quick bright exhalation through the air, again and again, a familiar partnerless dance. There are stars out overhead, but Micheletto can’t see them—too many clouds.

 

 

 

 

“Your mother is a good woman,” Gianetta says. Micheletto looks up, expression neutral. He has worn this look most of his life: cool flat eyes, disinterested, calm as still water. It comes as easily as it used to. “She is worried for you.”

“Yes.” Of course she does. She is his mother.

Gianetta sits beside him on the bench. Her eyes are downcast; her hands twist a dishrag into knots and then unwind it again. This is what common people look like when they are anxious, when they cannot find the right words. Micheletto spent so long in Cesare’s company he has forgotten what uncertainty looks like.

Gianetta sucks in a breath. 

“When my parents died,” she says, “I had nothing. My mother was a cook in the Lady Sforza’s castle, and my father died in the field fighting that Duke’s army, so they had little enough between them. Perhaps they could have given me a small dowry, but once I was alone there was no reason anyone would marry me. Signora Corella gave me hope.” She looks up, smiles. “Now I can make the best bean stew in a hundred miles.”

Her father died in the field fighting that Duke’s army. Micheletto reaches up, absently, to grip his doublet. He was there that day. It was the middle of winter, and cold. The siege lasted two months but the battle only a few hours; the powder explosion from the citadel left them all coated in soot, and several of Caterina’s men died long, painful deaths. Her clothes reeked of smoke when Cesare bound her to her horse. The men had taken her armor. They had taken her dresses for their wives. 

On the way back to Cesena, Cesare had more wine than was usual. Leaned in close, he felt like nothing more than skin stretched over sacks of red-burning coal. “They will remember this.”

“They, my lord?”

“Everyone. History. They’ll remember me.”

They’d had plays in Cesena, and masques, and several times Cesare convinced him to participate in knife-throwing contests with the condotierri. Three nights after they took Forlì, Cesare convinced him to dance. Nothing with steps, just a fast, swinging dance to discordant music, everyone roaring drunk, but Cesare had put his hands on Micheletto’s ribs and pulled him close, hard, laughing into his neck.

“Signori? Micheletto?” Gianetta leans forward.

Now, who knows if Cesare is even alive.

“Excuse me,” he says, too quickly, and stands.

“Are you… should I fetch Signora Corella?”

He vomits just in the back of the house, the taste of chalk and sour grapes on his tongue. He spits, stares at the puddle in the rushes, tries to make sense of it. He can’t.

 

 

 

 

"Augustino is asking after you," his mother says one afternoon, as he reads a letter from Rome. Pope Julius is riding north the following week, at the head of a force of 3,000 men, but he will pass nowhere near Forlì, and nowhere near Florence, and nowhere near Ferrara. Micheletto doesn’t know what to do with this information. He is running out of money to pay for it. 

“What shall I tell him?" his mother asks.

Micheletto looks up. He hardly remembers what Augustino looks like. He knows the vague outlines of his face, his hair color, but beyond that there is nothing more than a distant memory of adolescent passion, long gone cold. There was another boy once, less innocent but no less beautiful, who read him poetry and let Micheletto fuck him in the dim, clangorous Roman mornings. Once, there was Cesare. Now there is no one.

Micheletto turns back to his letter. "Tell him he is mistaken. Tell him I am not here."

But of course he sees him about a week later. Forlì is not a large city; it is inevitable. Micheletto is coming from the butcher’s, and Augustino is carrying a basket of bread. He sees Augustino, but Augustino does not see him. Micheletto watches until Augustino passes around a corner, and then he turns his face forward again, and walks on. Cesare laughs in his ear, a quick huff of breath. Micheletto closes his eyes.

 

 

 

 

“Signora Corella said you had scars. I had not imagined they were as terrible as that,” Gianetta says. Her eyes are deep and solemn, curious in the harsh summer sun. The air smells like old wood and horse piss from the streets. “Was it your father who did that to you?”

Micheletto pulls his shirt straight. He cannot kill her for asking too many questions, not here, not of his own volition, yet his body relaxes, breath pulling deep in his chest. There is no knife in his hand, so his fingers close on air.

“No,” he says.

“Someone you served badly, then? My friend Mariella was beaten so badly by her master she’s still limping, months later.”

Whoever it was must have broken a bone. Broken it, but not cleanly, then had it set poorly as well. It is yet another reason this city needs a doctore. It is difficult business, making something you can’t see whole again, but Micheletto has had practice.

He shakes his head. “The last man I served whipped me only once, and it was not for failure. These are from one who wanted his secrets.”

“But you are just a doctore.”

He pauses. Looks at her, hard, and sees only confusion there. She is a young girl, provincial, with no prospects and few skills; if she knew the truth she would not be dangerous, but there is no reason for it. “Yes,” he says. “And doctore serve. He was a man eminent in his field, so he knew things.”

“Who was he?”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s probably dead.”

“...I’m sorry.” 

It is the only time anyone will offer their condolences. She doesn’t know who he’s mourning, what Cesare was and could have been in the world, but he bows his head a little in acknowledgement, and goes back to his letter. _There is a girl here,_ he writes Niccolò. _If I sent her to Florence, could you see to her?_ And then he stops. Through the half-open door, the tangerine light of sunset has picked all the trees out in gold. He crumples the letter, the expensive paper, then burns it, remembering the bonfires in Florence, how Cesare had looked obscured by ash. The soot is feather-soft between his fingertips.

 

 

 

 

He settles. He tells his neighbors what to take for headaches, for stomach cramps, to prevent pregnancy. He finds himself gathering oleander and belladonna before remembering he has no longer has need of them, though he keeps a bundle of each in a hidden pocket in his saddlebag, because it calms him to know it’s there if he ever needs it. More often he finds himself dispensing advice on wounds, sprains and dislocated shoulders and toothaches. He knows nothing about toothaches, but if he knows how to pull an arm from its socket, he knows how to put it back. So it is no surprise when a man rushes into the house one day, leaning slightly out of breath against the doorframe. It is not an emergency, whatever it is; he has not run fast enough.

“Signora Corella said you’re a doctore,” the man says. Micheletto does not answer, so he goes on: “My niece has fallen from our wagon and her arm—she is in pain.“ He catches Micheletto by the shoulder and Micheletto can’t help flinching, a full-body motion that makes the man back away a little, but not enough. “Your mother said….”

Micheletto looks at him, nods. “Just a moment.”

He has no tools to bring except his knife and garrote, but he carries these with him always, even here. It is probably a broken bone, anyway. Anything he needs can be called for later. Cloth, a splint. Certain herbs, if the break is bad. He has had more cause to break bones than to set them, but he can do it, if needs must.

“I’ve brought the doctore,” the man says when they arrive. There is a hushed wave of relief through the gathered crowd. Gianetta is sitting at the girl’s side, a hand on the girl’s shoulder; she looks up when he kneels.

“My friend Miriella,” she says, and smiles. “She has bad luck.”

“Which arm?” he asks. Then, when she doesn’t answer: “Which arm, girl?” She uses her left arm to point at her right, and he feels along the bones, to the wrist where they split and then come together again. When they crucified men they used to put nails through the wrist, instead of the hands, because of the space between the bones. It held together better. Once or twice Giuliano threatened him with crucifixion, which seemed almost a mercy. Terrible pain, yes, but death at the end of it.

When he comes to the place where the pain spikes, the girl’s head comes up. “You don’t look like him,” she says.

He doesn’t look up as he works. The break is clean. It will heal well, if she rests and does not poke at it. “Like who.” 

“The doctore. He has dark eyes, dark hair like a halo around his head.… He has a nice voice, a fine face….” She giggles. Distant eyes, vague drugged smile. He suspects they’ve given her something. “Handsomest man in Italy, he said, but I think it was a joke.”

“Come,” he says, slinging her uninjured arm across his shoulders. “Up. Better you were lying down.”

He leads her to her bed, and watches as she sits, but does not stay any longer than that. But what she said circles round and round in his head like a persistent fly even once he’s gotten home, and he can’t get rid of it, can’t shut it out. If nothing else, he should know what sorts of things might come up behind him and tip him into a ditch when he isn’t looking. 

“Mama.”

She’s repairing a torn dress on the bench opposite, in the sun from the open door. To take advantage of the light, she’d said. Her eyes aren’t what they used to be. “Yes?”

“When I was setting that girl’s arm, she said there’d been another doctore. One who helped with her leg.”

“Oh, well, about a month before you came home, we had a visitor.” She casts a pleased look at him over her sewing. “Your old doctore.”

His doctore? "Who?"

"You brought him to visit that once, remember? That's how I recognized him. He looked a sight though, Micheletto. I was almost afraid to let him in. He stayed a few days, and once word got out he was a doctore he was obliged to help, wasn’t he?"

Cesare. Micheletto's hand spasms into a fist around his spoon; his mouth is dry and he feels, he feels…. "Was he well?" he asks. His voice is an uneven rasp, choked off in his throat. He has been thinking of staying in Forli, of practicing a different sort of medicine than the one he was trained in, but now all he can think of is Cesare. The void in his chest tears open.

“He looked as though he'd spent a few months in someone's dungeons, Micheletto, I will not lie. Has he gotten himself mixed up in something? A doctore should be a respectable man, I would not wish you—"

"Was he _well_ , Mama."

She shrugs, one-shouldered, as though it is unimportant. Micheletto’s face is calm, wiped clean of all expression, but his heart is tumbling and flailing in his chest. "He rode in on his own horse, and rode off on it again when he was finished,” she says. "He said to tell you that he would be going to his brother-in-law’s in Navarre."

It is good enough. Cesare is alive. His lord is alive. And if he is in Navarre…. 

Micheletto tips the bowl against his lips, swallows down half his stew and leaves the rest on the table. It will not do to eat too much before a long ride, such as the one he has ahead of him; on several occasions while in Cesare's service he had pushed himself too hard, and wasted precious minutes vomiting into bushes beside dark Italian roads. Tonight he is going much further than that. He will stay to the coastline once he reaches it, heading north and then west, until the language changes to French and than to Spanish. His French is not good, but it will serve. His Spanish is excellent.

“Micheletto?”

He lays his spoon down beside his bowl. “I should go, Mama.”

“But—but you’ve hardly arrived!” 

But he has been here nearly two months. Two months during which Cesare languished in some foreign court, all the great powers of Italy slavering for his death. “Thank you for the stew. And for letting me stay.” Micheletto moves toward the fireplace to gather his things. When he came he had nothing but the clothes on his back and a stolen sword; now he has more clothes, a sword of his own, and two cheese cutters looped into his belt. He will steal everything else. The first thing he must acquire: a stronger horse. The one he has, poor thing, will not make it past the Alps. Better a clean end now than dying, shivering and exhausted, in the thin mountain air.

“And Gianetta?” Isabella asks.

He slips a small knife from the kitchen into his boot. “What of her?”

“I thought you two might marry. She likes you, you know. She is uneducated, but she can cook, she knows her prayers—”

“Mama. I never meant to stay this long,” he says, which is true. He says, “I need to continue my work,” which is a lie, but only if you look at it head-on. She watches him pack, and he knows how this must look, and doesn’t care. She is his mother, and he loves her enough to lie to her, but he will always belong to Cesare Borgia.

He is finished packing in a matter of minutes, and when he is done he pauses, staring at the bags. It seems it should take him longer to be gone. His mother pulls him into her arms when he looks at her. “I thought you were going to stay,” she says into his ear, then holds him at arm’s length. She’s on the edge of tears, but she’s smiling. He had thought the same.

When she has released him, he lifts his saddlebags and throws them easily over his shoulder. They are light, but he has packed all his things. He has his weapons at his hip and a horse outside and Cesare waiting for him at the end of his journey, and he has never needed anything more.

It’s nearly sunset. The road is long, but he knows the way.


End file.
